Twitter owner Elon Musk is reaching out to experts in artificial intelligence to assemble a team and build a rival to OpenAI's ChatGPT, according to a report by The Information.
The project is still in its early stages with nothing concrete yet regarding products or timetables, but Igor Babuschkin, who recently left Alphabet's DeepMind AI unit, has been tapped to lead the team.
Since the public launch last November of ChatGPT, the chatbot that can generate complex answers and long form writing in response to user queries, Musk has criticized the AI for being "scary" and possibly "woke." He also found it "concerning" that ChatGPT would not use a racial slur even if using the word would disarm a nuclear bomb, as part of an absurd hypothetical situation posed by a user.
On Tuesday Musk tweeted "BasedAI," a reference to the term "based," which means being focused on maintaining one's individuality regardless of what others say, though in conservative circles it often identifies someone with non-politically correct opinions. Musk even tweeted a meme showing the "Based AI" fight off the "Woke AI."
However, Babuschkin clarified when speaking with The Information that the goal of Musk's AI project was not to create AI with fewer safeguards.
“The goal is to improve the reasoning abilities and the factualness of these language models,” he said.
Musk's opposition to ChatGPT is surprising as he was one of the original founders of OpenAI, though he severed ties with the company over disagreements with its direction, moving from nonprofit to for-profit, and because it was competing for some of the same talent as Tesla.
"OpenAI was created as an open source (which is why I named it “Open” AI), non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft," Musk tweeted recently. "Not what I intended at all."
